Former first lady details problems with communication system

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In her memoir, “Spoken From the Heart,” former first lady Laura Bush shares a detailed account of being in the White House during the terrorist attacks. An excerpt.

Goodness in the land of the living
Tuesday morning, September 11, was sunny and warm, the sky a brilliant cerulean blue. The day before, I had hosted a lunch for Janette Howard, wife of the Australian prime minister, while George met with her husband, John. My friends who had come for the National Book Festival had all flown home, and even George was gone, in Florida for a school visit. George H. W. Bush and Bar had spent the night, but they had already left at 7:00 a.m. to catch an early flight. And I had what I considered a big day planned. I was set to arrive at the Capitol at 9:15 to brief the Senate Education Committee, chaired by Edward M. Kennedy, on the findings of the early childhood development conference that I’d held in July. In the afternoon, we were hosting the entire Congress and their families for the annual Congressional Picnic. The South Lawn of the White House was already covered with picnic tables awaiting their fluttering cloths, and Tom Perini from Buffalo Gap, Texas, was setting up his chuckwagons. Our entertainment would be old-fashioned square dancing and Texas swing music by Ray Benson and his classic band, Asleep at the Wheel.

I finished dressing in silence, going over my statement again in my mind. I was very nervous about appearing before a Senate committee and having news cameras trained on me. Had the TV been turned on, I might have heard the first fleeting report of a plane hitting the North Tower of the World Trade Center at the tip of Manhattan as I walked out the door to the elevator. Instead, it was the head of my Secret Service detail, Ron Sprinkle, who leaned over and whispered the news in my ear as I entered the car a few minutes after 9:00 a.m. for the ride to the Russell Senate Office Building, adjacent to the Capitol. Andi Ball, now my chief of staff at the White House; Domestic Policy Advisor Margaret Spellings; and I speculated about what could have happened: a small plane, a Cessna perhaps, running into one of those massive towers on this perfect September morning. We wondered too if Hillary Clinton might decide not to attend the committee briefing, since the World Trade Center was in New York. We were driving up Pennsylvania Avenue when word came that the South Tower had been hit. The car fell silent; we sat in mute disbelief. One plane might be a strange accident; two planes were clearly an attack. I thought about George and wondered if the Secret Service had already hustled him to the motorcade and begun the race to Air Force One to return home. Two minutes later, at 9:16 a.m., we pulled up at the entrance to the Russell Building. In the time it had taken to drive the less than two miles between the White House and the Capitol, the world as I knew it had irrevocably changed.

Video: Laura Bush: We endured a 'viciousness'
Senator Kennedy was waiting to greet me, according to plan. We both knew when we met that the towers had been hit and, without a word being spoken, knew that there would be no briefing that morning. Together, we walked the short distance to his office. He began by presenting me with a limited-edition print; it was a vase of bright daffodils, a copy of a painting he had created for his wife, Victoria, and given to her on their wedding day. The print was inscribed to me and dated September 11, 2001.

An old television was turned on in a corner of the room, and I glanced over to see the plumes of smoke billowing from the Twin Towers. Senator Kennedy kept his eyes averted from the screen. Instead he led me on a tour of his office, pointing out various pictures, furniture, pieces of memorabilia, even a framed note that his brother Jack had sent to their mother when he was a child, in which he wrote, “Teddy is getting fat.” The senator, who would outlive all his brothers by more than forty years, laughed at the note as he showed it to me, still finding it amusing.

All the while, I kept glancing over at the glowing television screen. My skin was starting to crawl, I wanted to leave, to find out what was going on, to process what I was seeing, but I felt trapped in an endless cycle of pleasantries. It did not occur to me to say, “Senator Kennedy, what about the towers?” I simply followed his lead, and he may have feared that if we actually began to contemplate what had happened in New York, I might dissolve into tears.

Senator Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the ranking Republican on the committee and one of our very good friends in the Senate — Judd had played Al Gore for George during mock debates at the ranch the previous fall — was also designated to escort me to the committee room, and he arrived just as I was completing the tour. Senator Kennedy invited us to sit on the couches, and he continued chatting about anything other than the horrific images unfolding on the tiny screen across the room. I looked around his shoulder but could see very little, and I was still trying to pay attention to him and the thread of his conversation. It seemed completely unreal, sitting in this elegant, sunlit office as an immense tragedy unfolded. We sat as human beings driven by smoke, flame, and searing heat jumped from the tops of the Twin Towers to end their lives and as firemen in full gear began the climb up the towers’ stairs.

I have often wondered if the small talk that morning was Ted Kennedy’s defense mechanism, if after so much tragedy — the combat death of his oldest brother in World War II, the assassinations of his brothers Jack and Robert, and the deaths of nephews, including John Jr., whose body he identified when it was pulled from the cold, dark waters off Martha’s Vineyard — if after all of those things, he simply could not look upon another grievous tragedy.

At about 9:45, after George had made a brief statement to the nation, which we watched, clustered around a small television that was perched on the receptionist’s desk, Ted Kennedy, Judd Gregg, and I walked out to tell reporters that my briefing had been postponed. I said, “You heard from the president this morning, and Senator Kennedy and Senator Gregg and I both join his statement in saying that our hearts and our prayers go out to the victims of this act of terrorism, and that our support goes to the rescue workers. And all of our prayers are with everyone there right now.” As I turned to exit, Laurence McQuillan of USA Today asked a question. “Mrs. Bush, you know, children are kind of struck by all this. Is there a message you could tell to the nation’s —” I didn’t even wait for him to finish but began, “Well, parents need to reassure their children everywhere in our country that they’re safe.”

As we walked out of the briefing room, the cell phone of my advance man, John Meyers, rang. A friend told him that CNN was reporting that an airplane had crashed into the Pentagon. Within minutes, the order would be given to evacuate the White House and the Capitol.

I walked back to Senator Kennedy’s office and then began moving quickly toward the stairs, to reach my car to return to the White House. Suddenly, the lead Secret Service agent turned to me and my staff and said that we needed to head to the basement immediately. We took off at a run; Judd Gregg suggested his private office, which was in the lower level and was an interior room. The Secret Service then told John that they were waiting for an Emergency Response Team to reach the Capitol. The team would take me, but my staff would be left behind. Overhearing the conversation, I turned back and said, “No, everyone is coming.” We entered Judd’s office, where I tried to call Barbara and Jenna, and Judd tried to call his daughter, who was in New York. Then we sat and talked quietly about our families and our worries for them, and the overwhelming shock we both felt.

Sometime after 10:00 a.m., when the entire Capitol was being emptied, when White House staffers had fled barefoot and sobbing through the heavy iron gates with Secret Service agents shouting at them to “Run, run!” my agents collected me. They now included an additional Secret Service detail and an Emergency Response Team, dressed in black tactical clothing like a SWAT force and moving with guns drawn. As we raced through the dim hallways of the Russell Building, past panicked staffers emptying from their offices, the ERT team shouted “GET BACK” and covered my every move with their guns. We reached the underground entrance; the doors on the motorcade slammed shut, and we sped off. The Secret Service had decided to take me temporarily to their headquarters, located in a nondescript federal office building a few blocks from the White House. Following the Oklahoma City bombing, their offices had been reinforced to survive a large-scale blast. Outside our convoy windows, the city streets were clogged with people evacuating their workplaces and trying to reach their own homes.

Video: Laura Bush on best, worst day in White House
By the time I had reached my motorcade, Flight 93 had crashed in a Pennsylvania field and the west side of the Pentagon had begun to collapse. Judd Gregg walked alone to the underground Senate parking garage and retrieved his car, the last one left there. He pulled out of the garage and headed home, across the Fourteenth Street Bridge and past the Pentagon, thick with smoke and flame.

In the intervening years, Judd and I, and many others, were left to contemplate what if Flight 93 had not been forced down by its passengers into an empty field; what if, shortly after 10:00 a.m., it had reached the Capitol Dome?

We arrived at the Secret Service building via an underground entrance and were escorted first to the director’s office and then belowground to a windowless conference room with blank walls and a mustard yellow table. A large display screen with a constant TV feed took up most of one wall. Walking through the hallways, I saw a sign emblazoned with the emergency number 9-1-1. Had the terrorists thought about our iconic number when they picked this date and planned an emergency so overwhelming? For a while, I sat in a small area off the conference room, silently watching the images on television. I watched the replay as the South Tower of the World Trade Center roared with sound and then collapsed into a silent gray plume, offering my personal prayer to God to receive the victims with open arms. The North Tower had given way, live in front of my eyes, sending some 1,500 souls and 110 stories of gypsum and concrete buckling to the ground.

Slideshow: First daughters
So much happened during those terrible hours at the tip of Manhattan. That morning, as the people who worked in the towers descended, water from the sprinkler system was racing down the darkened stairwells. With their feet soaked, for some the greatest fear was that when they reached the bottom, the rushing water would be too high and they would be drowned. A few walked to safety under a canopy of skylights covered with the bodies of those who had jumped. Over two hundred people jumped to escape the heat, smoke, and flames. I was told that Father Mychal Judge, the chaplain for the New York City Fire Department, who had come to offer aid, comfort, and last rites, was killed that morning by the body of someone who had, in desperation, hurled himself from the upper floors of one of those towers.

The early expectation was for horrific numbers of deaths. Manhattan emergency rooms and hospitals as far away as Dallas were placed on Code Red, expecting to receive airlifted survivors. Some fifty thousand people worked inside the towers; on a beautiful day, as many as eighty thousand tourists would visit an observation deck on the South Tower’s 107th floor, where the vistas stretched for fifty miles. Had those hijacked planes struck the towers thirty or forty or fifty minutes later, the final toll might well have been in the tens of thousands.

Inside Secret Service headquarters, I asked my staff to call their families, and I called the girls, who had been whisked away by Secret Service agents to secure locations. In Austin, Jenna had been awakened by an agent pounding on her dorm door. In her room at Yale, Barbara had heard another student sobbing uncontrollably a few doors down. Then I called my mother, because I wanted her to know that I was safe and I wanted so much to hear the sound of her voice. And I tried to reach George, but my calls could not get through; John Meyers, my advance man, promised to keep trying. I did know from the Secret Service that George had taken off from Florida, safe on board Air Force One. I knew my daughters and my mother were safe. But beyond that, everything was chaos. I was told that Barbara Olson, wife of Solicitor General Ted Olson, had been aboard the plane that hit the Pentagon. At one point, we also received word that Camp David had been attacked and hit. I began thinking of all the people who would have been there, like Bob Williams, the chaplain. Another report had a plane crashing into our ranch in Crawford. It got so that we were living in five-minute increments, wondering if a new plane would emerge from the sky and hit a target. All of us in that basement conference room and many more in the Secret Service building were relying on rumors and on whatever news came from the announcers on television. When there were reports of more errant planes or other targets, it was almost impossible not to believe them.

George had tried to call me from Air Force One. It is stunning now to think that our “state-of-the-art” communications would not allow him to complete a phone call to Secret Service headquarters, or me to reach him on Air Force One. On my second call from the secure line, our third attempt, I was finally able to contact the plane, a little before twelve noon. I was grateful just to hear his voice, to know that he was all right, and to tell him the girls were fine. From the way he spoke, I could hear how starkly his presidency had been transformed.

We remained in that drab conference room for hours, eventually turning off the repetitive horror of the images on the television. Inside, I felt a grief, a loss, a mourning like I had never known.

A few blocks away, in the Chrysler offices near Pennsylvania Avenue, a group of White House senior staff began to gather. After the evacuation, some of those who were new to Washington had been wandering, dazed and shaken, in nearby Lafayette Park. By midafternoon, seventy staff members had congregated inside this office building, attempting to resume work, while Secret Service agents stood in the lobby and forbade anyone without a White House pass from entering. Key presidential and national security staff and Vice President Cheney were still sealed away in the small underground emergency center deep below the White House.

As the skies and streets grew silent, there was a debate over what to do with George and what to do with me. The Secret Service detail told me to be prepared to leave Washington for several days at least. My assistant, Sarah Moss, was sent into the White House to gather some of my clothes. John Meyers accompanied her to retrieve Spot, Barney, and Kitty.

Then we got word that the president was returning to Washington. I would be staying as well. Late in the afternoon, I spoke to George again. At 6:30 we got in a Secret Service caravan to drive to the White House. I gazed out the window; the city had taken on the cast of an abandoned movie set: the sun was shining, but the streets were deserted. We could not see a person on the sidewalk or any vehicles driving on the street. There was no sound at all except for the roll of our wheels over the ground.

We drove at full throttle through the gate, and the agents hopped out. Heavily armed men in black swarmed over the grounds. Before I got out, one of my agents, Dave Saunders, who had been driving, turned around and said, “Mrs. Bush, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” He said it with the greatest of concern and a hint of emotion in his voice. He knew what this day meant for us.

I was hustled inside and downstairs through a pair of big steel doors that closed behind me with a loud hiss, forming an airtight seal. I was now in one of the unfinished subterranean hallways underneath the White House, heading for the PEOC, the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, built for President Franklin Roosevelt during World War II. We walked along old tile floors with pipes hanging from the ceiling and all kinds of mechanical equipment. The PEOC is designed to be a command center during emergencies, with televisions, phones, and communications facilities.

I was ushered into the conference room adjacent to the PEOC’s nerve center. It’s a small room with a large table. National Security Advisor Condi Rice, Counselor to the President Karen Hughes, Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, and Dick and Lynne Cheney were already there, where they had been since the morning. Lynne, whose agents had brought her to the White House just after the first attack, came over and hugged me. Then she said quietly into my ear, “The plane that hit the Pentagon circled the White House first.”

I felt a shiver vibrate down my spine. Unlike the major monuments and even the leading government buildings in Washington, the White House sits low to the ground. It is a three-story building, tucked away in a downward slope toward the Potomac. When the White House was first built, visitors complained about the putrid scent rising from the river and the swampy grounds nearby. From the air, the White House is hard to see and hard to reach. A plane could circle it and find no plausible approach. And that is what Lynne Cheney told me had happened that morning, a little past 9:30, before Flight 77 crossed the river and thundered into the Pentagon.

At 7:10 that night, George strode into the PEOC. Early that afternoon, he had conducted a secure videoconference from Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska with the CIA and FBI directors, as well as the military Joint Chiefs of Staff and the vice president and his national security staff, giving instructions and getting briefings on the latest information. Over the objections of the Secret Service, he had insisted upon returning home. We hugged and talked with the Cheneys a bit. Then the Secret Service detail suggested that we spend the night there, belowground. They showed us the bed, a foldout that looked like it had been installed when FDR was president. George and I stared at it, and we both said no, George adding, “We’re not going to sleep down here. We’re going to go upstairs and you can get us if something happens.” He said, “I’ve got to get sleep, in our own bed.” George was preparing to speak to the nation from the Oval Office, to reassure everyone and to show that the president was safely back in Washington, ready to respond.

By 7:30 we were on our way up to the residence. I have no memory of having eaten dinner — George may have eaten on the plane. He tried to call the girls as soon as we were upstairs but couldn’t reach them. Barbara called back close to 8:00 p.m., and then George left to make remarks to the nation.

We did finally climb into our own bed that night, exhausted and emotionally drained. Outside the doors of the residence, the Secret Service detail stood in their usual posts. I fell asleep, but it was a light, fitful rest, and I could feel George staring into the darkness beside me. Then I heard a man screaming as he ran, “Mr. President, Mr. President, you’ve got to get up. The White House is under attack.”

We jumped up, and I grabbed a robe and stuck my feet into my slippers, but I didn’t stop to put in my contacts. George grabbed Barney; I grabbed Kitty. With Spot trailing behind, we started walking down to the PEOC. George had wanted to take the elevator, but the agents didn’t think it was safe, so we had to descend flight after flight of stairs, to the state floor, then the ground floor, and below, while I held George’s hand because I couldn’t see anything. My heart was pounding, and all I could do was count stairwell landings, trying to count off in my mind how many more floors we had to go. When we reached the PEOC, I saw the outline of a military sergeant unfolding the ancient hideaway bed and putting on some sheets.

At that moment, another agent ran up to us and said, “Mr. President, it’s one of our own.” The plane was ours.

For months afterward at night, in bed, we’d hear the military jets thundering overhead, traveling so fast that the ground below quivered and shook. They would make one pass and then, three or five minutes later, make another low-flying loop. I would fall asleep to the roar of the fighters in the skies, hearing in my mind those words, “one of our own.” There was a quiet security in that, in knowing that we slept beneath the watchful cover of our own.

Waking the next morning, I had the sensation of knowing before my eyes opened that something terrible had happened, something beyond comprehension, and I wondered for a brief instant if it had all been a dream. Then I saw George, and I knew, knew that yesterday would be with us, each day, for all of our days to come.

Video: Laura Bush reflects on lifetime of memories

Transcript of: Laura Bush reflects on lifetime of memories

ANN CURRY, anchor:Back now at 8:07 with the famously private former first lady
Laura Bush
, who is now opening up about her life in a candid new memoir called "
Spoken
from the
Heart
."
For the first time
she's revealing intimate details about her life, from her upbringing in
West Texas
to her eight years in the
White House
. We'll
speak
with
Laura Bush
in just a moment. But first, our contributing correspondent
Jenna Bush Hager
has a few thoughts to weigh in this morning.

JENNA BUSH HAGER reporting:Yes.

CURRY:Jenna
, good morning.

HAGER:Good morning. Some very serious thoughts.
One of the best
things about my mom's new book is that I have a permanent
record
of her life and all of her memories that we can share together. So I sat down with my sister,
Barbara
, over some
Texas
limeades to talk about what she writes about and, of course, to laugh.

Ms. LAURA BUSH:"Our lives in those years in
Midland
were centered on our
family
and our
friends
. Often
Mother
and
Daddy
would come for dinner. I would call
mother
late in the afternoon to see what she was cooking and we'd put our meals together around our
little
table.

HAGER:And now around our
little
table in
Crawford
, my
mother
, my sister
Barbara
and I spent a late afternoon reliving some of mom's memories as only a
mother
and her daughters can. So, Mom, one of my favorite things about your book is all of the great pictures. I think they're so much fun to look at. Look how angelic Mom looked right here.

Ms. BARBARA BUSH:She looks so cute.

HAGER:You look very cute. Were you -- would you say you were a very good child?

Ms. L. BUSH:I would say I was a very good child, a lot like you and
Barbara
.

HAGER:Or better than us?

Ms. L. BUSH:No, probably a lot like you and
Barbara
.

HAGER:And one question about this picture.

Ms. L. BUSH:Is why did I
put it in
the book?

HAGER:Yeah, what exactly motivated you? Those cat glasses are...

Ms. L. BUSH:This is probably when I was about 11, wearing these cat glasses and the
poodle skirt
. I had to
put it in
especially for the
poodle skirt
. It is a
birthday party
, as you can tell. That's my birthday photo.

HAGER:Did boys like you when you were 11?

Ms. L. BUSH:I don't think so, looking at that picture.

HAGER:How could you resist a face like that?

Ms. B. BUSH:Oh.

Ms. L. BUSH:This is a very funny photo. This is when we were campaigning with
Gampy
...

Ms. B. BUSH:Look at your face.

Ms. L. BUSH:...when he was running for president, and we were on our way to
Kansas City
and you pulled your tooth out on the
plane
.

HAGER:Barbara
's face is like, `Oh, she's at it again.' Were you scared of
Ganny
at first?

Ms. L. BUSH:She is slightly intimidating, there's
no doubt about it
. I write in the book that we didn't really bond until we'd been
married
probably 10 years, when we all moved to
Washington
to work on
Gampy
's campaign. That was the first time we'd ever lived in the same town,
Bar
and I, and gave us a
chance
to really get to know each other.

HAGER:And then you...

Ms. L. BUSH:And I
loved her because she loved
Daddy
...

HAGER:Mm-hmm.

Ms. L. BUSH:...so much.

HAGER:So here's a picture of something we know very well that Mom likes to do.
Barbara
, can you...

Ms. B. BUSH:Clean.

HAGER:...describe mom's passion?

Ms. B. BUSH:Mom has a passion for everything clean and orderly.

HAGER:Do you remember when she used to wake us up on Saturday mornings, what the first thing she would say was?

Ms. B. BUSH:To get up and get organized?

HAGER:Girls
, you get up and organize. You're going to feel so much better after you do so.

Ms. L. BUSH:But you don't know, this is the
night
of the
2000
election.

HAGER:So you were wildly stressed.

Ms. B. BUSH:You were cleaning.

Ms. L. BUSH:No, I was wildly cleaning.

HAGER:It's called stress cleaning.

Ms. L. BUSH:This is when...

Ms. B. BUSH:Comfort cleaning.

Ms. L. BUSH:This is when we thought we were going to know who had won that
night
, but we didn't find out for another 36 days. And this is upstairs in the governor's mansion. And so we're just waiting to hear, and so I started to load the dishwasher.

HAGER:Out of stress?

Ms. L. BUSH:Yes. There were a lot of
dirty
dishes.

HAGER:Well,
how did you know
you loved
Dad
?

Ms. L. BUSH:I met
Daddy
on a
blind date
. Actually,
Jan
and
Joey O'Neil
invited us over to dinner in their backyard. It was just
the four of us
. What I loved best about him at the first was his
sense of humor
and how quick he is and funny he is and how much fun he is to be with, and so it seemed really
meant to be
.

HAGER:You guys got
married
three months later.
Barbara
and I have sometimes thought that was really fast. Did anybody say, `
Wow!
That's'...

Ms. L. BUSH:The only people that were sort of worried were
Jan
and
Joey
, who were the ones that had fixed us up. They just thought we were moving maybe a
little
quickly. But you can tell from this picture how happy we were. OK,
Jen
, you ready?

HAGER:Yeah, let's go. More than 30 years later, my parents spend their happiest moments here in
Crawford
.
Prairie Chapel Ranch
, a place they jokingly call "the
promised land
," is covered with picturesque canyons and an infinite
Texas
skyline. Here they once hosted more than a dozen
world leaders
. And it's a place of
family
, too. My mom and I decided to visit the part of the ranch we both love, a symbol of one of the happiest moments of my life.

Unidentified Man:Who presents the bride to be
married
this
evening
?

President GEORGE W. BUSH:Her
mother
and I.

Man:Good answer.

Ms. L. BUSH:So this is the
cross
that was
Daddy
's idea to bring in for your...

HAGER:Wedding.

Ms. L. BUSH:...especially for the wedding and then to have here
forever
. So this is the spot where you got
married
.

HAGER:So this is it. Two years later. Seems like it was just yesterday.

Ms. L. BUSH:It does seem like it was just yesterday to your
mother
, too.

HAGER:I'll ask one more thing and then I'll let you go, because I know you have a very busy
schedule
. But where do you see yourself in 10 years?

Ms. L. BUSH:Well, that's a good question for you to ask. I hope I see myself surrounded by grandchildren.

HAGER:Oh! Barbara?

Ms. L. BUSH:You just set yourself up,
Jenna
.

HAGER:For
disaster
. Do you think you'll retire at a -- here?

Ms. L. BUSH:I think we'll stay here a lot of the time, which I hope we will. And then we'll be busy, I hope, at the
Bush Institute
and the
Bush Library
. And so we'll be between
Dallas
and here at the ranch.

HAGER:Now, away from the pressures of the offices they held for eight years, my parents have returned to the home they love. They can now exhale and live.

Ms. L. BUSH:"I remember one
summerevening
working in the
flower
beds in our yard after the girls had gone to
sleep
, while the sun still hung low in the sky.
George
was sitting on the
steps
with the newspaper, and I thought to myself, `
This is the life
.' And it was."

CURRY:Jenna
, my goodness, what a great job you did.

HAGER:Well, she's a very easy interview.

Ms. L. BUSH:Well, you were a very easy interviewer.

CURRY:Yeah, except for that one question about whether -- what -- where you're going to see yourself in 10 years and those babies.

HAGER:Oh, yeah. I set myself up.

CURRY:But let me ask you to take off your reporters hat for a moment and put on your daughters hat...

HAGER:Mm-hmm.

CURRY:...and ask you, because you've read the book...

HAGER:Mm-hmm.

CURRY:...what was the most poignant moment for you? What did you learn about your
mother
that really touched your
heart
?

HAGER:Well, it was really wonderful to read. She's a private lady from
West Texas
, so she didn't tell us much about her life. So when we read about how much she wanted us and how hard it was for her to get pregnant with us, it really made us
understand
the bond that we have now and why, when she says she wants her chicks to be home with her, now we get it.

CURRY:Yeah.

Ms. L. BUSH:A
mother
hen.

CURRY:And --
mother
-- yeah. But it also comes out of your own experience being raised as an only child.